I homeschooled, graduated at 16 and got my bachelor's at 18. Now writing about big idea in education, learning science, and sociology. Founder @GeniusGTX
Joined February 2020
- Tweets9K
- Following861
- Followers40.2K
- Likes41.2K
Pinned Tweet
I'm 18.
I’m obsessed with learning how to learn.
So, I spent 200+ hours studying how geniuses, prodigies, and high performers master their disciplines.
Here's what I found on how to master anything faster:
Toan Truong retweeted
"Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism."
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985)
Toan Truong retweeted
"Talent is like the marksman who hits a target which others cannot reach; genius is like the marksman who hits a target, as far as which others cannot even see."
Arthur Schopenhauer, On Genius
"Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism."
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985)
"Talent is like the marksman who hits a target which others cannot reach; genius is like the marksman who hits a target, as far as which others cannot even see."
Arthur Schopenhauer, On Genius
just a daily reminder to protect yourself. the less content you consume throughout the day, the more room your brain has for an idea of its own
Joe Liemandt says middle school is where girls decide they're "not math people." But there isn't one study that backs that up.
Peter Attia: "Think of all the kids that are in sixth, seventh and eighth grade who are good students in other domains. They're doing well in English, they're doing well in history, they're conscientious, they work hard, but they've created a narrative that says I can't do math."
Joe Liemandt: "It's an epidemic of kids who come into middle school, predominantly girls. I have two daughters. Who come in and they're like, I'm not a math science girl.
And there's just, like, society's accepting it. Okay, let's go read all the learning science papers about how middle school girls can't do math science. Okay, there are none. That doesn't exist. But it's this total meme that they believe.
"There's this concept of, oh, I'm an art girl or I'm an English girl. Girl, boy, there's just no difference. We have some seniors this year. The first one, she is doing the first all-teen produced, created musical for Broadway. So she'd be, I'm an arts theater girl. 790 math SAT. Another girl is trying out to be Miss Teen USA. 790 math SAT. Third girl, this is my daughter, she's got millions of likes on TikTok. Top 1% in teen math.
"There's this concept that these people can't learn it. They all can. Now, what do you have to do when they come into middle school? They don't know the multiplication tables. They don't know the prereqs. They are going to struggle in algebra. So you're like, okay, let's go back, let's fill them up. And all of a sudden, once you fill the holes, they can do it."
Hi! If you're new here, I'm Toan. I homeschooled at 15, graduated at 16, and got my bachelor's at 18.
Now I write about education, learning science, and psychology. Also building @GeniusGTX.
Follow me at @LearningToan if that interests you.
And if you're building something in EdTech or education, I'd love to catch up and hear what you're working on.
Joe Liemandt, founder of Alpha School, on The Peter Attia Drive
Toan Truong retweeted
Mark Zuckerberg explains why he thinks Elon Musk got it right when he cut 80% of Twitter's staff:
"Elon led a push early on to make Twitter a lot leaner. You can agree or disagree with exactly all the tactics, but a lot of the specific principles that he pushed on around basically trying to make the organization more technical, around decreasing the distance between engineers of the company and him, fewer layers of management, I think those were generally good changes"
"I also think that it was probably good for the industry that he made those changes because my sense is that there were a lot of other people who thought those were good changes but who may have been a little shy about doing them"
"Just in my conversations with other founders and how people have reacted to the things that we've done, what I've heard from a lot of folks is when someone like you, when I wrote the letter outlining the organizational changes I wanted to make back in March and when people see what Elon is doing, that gives people the ability to think through how to shape their organizations in a way that can be good for the industry and make all these companies more productive over time"
"That was one where I think he was quite ahead of a bunch of the other companies on. Certainly his actions led me and I think a lot of other folks in the industry to think about, hey, are we kind of doing this as much as we should? Could we make our companies better by pushing on some of these same principles?"
If you're new here, @GeniusGTX is a gallery for the greatest minds in economics, psychology, and history. Follow along for more similar content.
Toan Truong retweeted
In July we open-sourced a dynamic graph of everything a child learns in primary school. 1,590 concepts, 3,221 dependencies.
Now we’re turning every concept into interactive experiments kids can play and learn from.
First one, age 7: heat and water.
Everything that used to be a boring textbook can now be an engaging experience, potentially tailored to every child.
Kids education just got a massive upgrade.
Toan Truong retweeted
Jane Street doesn't hand out its GPU cluster through a committee. Researchers compete for it by bidding in a live internal auction.
No sign-offs. No meetings to divide it up. No manager picking whose model matters most this quarter.
"our compute cluster is available for everybody. you're tasked with realistically thinking about how to value this job you're running versus all the other things."
"and there's not really any guard rails."
The whole system is open to read and write. Every researcher can watch every other job, and any of them can stop one.
"you can just nuke somebody else's job anytime."
Which went about how you'd expect, at least once:
"there was an instance where an unwitting researcher ran a command in a jupyter notebook to adjust the bids on his job. he accidentally ran the command without any arguments — which meant he changed the bids of every single job running on the hive."
That got fixed. But the openness is the point: if your job breaks while you're away, a colleague spots it and pauses it.
"i see that you're running this job and this MFU is just terrible. what's going on?"
"a lot of things can be sorted out without it going up the ranks."
It's the same cluster shown in their data center film, 56 racks holding 4,032 GPUs and wired with 8,000 km of fiber, and all of it is handed out by internal price discovery.
A market maker ended up running a market just to decide who gets time on its own machine.
Interested in AI?
Follow @AiEvolutio58513 and never fall behind.
I track ChatGPT, Claude, and every tool quietly changing how we work and create, then hand you the tested signals.
"If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking."
Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
Toan Truong retweeted
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says a powerful enough AI model can get around attempts to shut it down, and that Anthropic has already seen it happen in simulations.
Interested in AI?
Follow @AiEvolutio58513 and never fall behind.
I track ChatGPT, Claude, and every tool quietly changing how we work and create, then hand you the tested signals.
Toan Truong retweeted
Elon Musk's timeline for the next five years:
"In 5 years, digital intelligence will exceed the sum of all human intelligence. Within five years, there may be at least 100 million humanoid robots, possibly even 1 billion. The economy could double in size within 5 to 7 years because AI and robotics may increase output dramatically. The pace of change will be so fast that the world could look very different in just a few years."
Interested in AI?
Follow @AiEvolutio58513 and never fall behind.
I track ChatGPT, Claude, and every tool quietly changing how we work and create, then hand you the tested signals.
When you turn 35 you'll see the difference between those who dared to be eccentric and those who didn't.
Jordan Peterson says creativity and conscientiousness have no correlation.
That's why someone like Elon Musk is one in 100 million
Jordan Peterson: "He also appears to me to be hyper conscientious, and I know people who've worked with him. Musk isn't just a creative genius, he's also an extremely conscientious engineer.
And really conscientious engineers, they have very interesting minds. When my brother-in-law understands something, he understands how to build it out of atoms. He understands it at every single level.
"Musk appears to me to be someone who's this rare combination of hyper creative but also hyper conscientious, and I know that he works all the time."
Chris Williamson: "Does that hypertrophied executive function help to wrangle some of the diffuse creative energy?"
Jordan Peterson: "Yes, definitely. Eric Weinstein's a good example. I hope Eric isn't annoyed by this, but Eric is unbelievably creative, but he's not particularly conscientious. And I think he found an occupation where that works extremely well, because he worked with Peter Thiel for quite a long time as his idea man.
"Musk is hyper creative and, as far as I can tell, hyper conscientious, and the conscientiousness does focus. Lots of people who are creative aren't conscientious. Well, it's rare.
There's no correlation between creativity and conscientiousness. So if you're the most creative person in a thousand and you're the most conscientious person in a thousand, you're one person in a million. And Musk is probably more like one person in a 100 million, something like that, maybe more."
Hi! If you're new here, I'm Toan. I homeschooled at 15, graduated at 16, and got my bachelor's at 18.
Now I write about education, learning science, and psychology. Also building @GeniusGTX.
Follow me at @LearningToan if that interests you.
And if you're building something in EdTech or education, I'd love to catch up and hear what you're working on.
Jordan Peterson, clinical psychologist, on Chris Williamson's Modern Wisdom
Toan Truong retweeted
The one thing I’d want everyone to know about Direct Instruction is that the methods, materials and routines are far less important than the underlying drive behind it: the unswerving belief that EVERY child can achieve, regardless of circumstance.
DI is based on a deeply held conviction that if a child didn’t learn, it was because the teacher (or curriculum) didn’t teach them properly. In that sense, it is a movement rooted in social justice but one which takes responsibility for outcomes.
In the 60s and 70s, there was a view in the education academic establishment that formal academic work was premature for 4-year-olds, and doubly so for poor ones; so what they needed was enrichment and play.
Worse still, in the early 70s, some academics described DI as a racist enterprise*. Engelmann's own memoir notes that he and Bereiter were called “Nazis” and “kid-haters.”
Despite this, Engelmann taught disadvantaged 4 year olds to factor and to solve simultaneous equations, and filmed it. Bereiter and Engelmann’s argument, set out in ‘Teaching Disadvantaged Children in the Preschool’, was that the disadvantaged child was not “behind” in some general developmental sense but behind in specific, teachable things, that all kids could learn with the right scope and sequence.
The preschool they opened in the mid 60s ran for two hours a day, with three twenty-minute lessons in language, arithmetic and reading, taught to small groups by a teacher following a specific DI sequence. Those kids made huge gains which faded when they went to normal public schools.
DI has its limitations like everything but the drive behind it is sincere. As #SoldAStory season 2 will show, it has been portrayed as something very different to what it actually is and the animating principles behind it.
*Baratz and Baratz, ‘Early childhood intervention: the social science base of institutional racism.’
Toan Truong retweeted
Children are born curious - and then, too often, trained out of it.
Study after study shows that children ask fewer questions as they age. Your job is to protect their curiosity and keep the flame burning bright.
Children rarely say, I’d like a science lesson now.
But they often say👇
Why does the moon change shape?
What are clouds made of?
Why do things fall down?
Questions are the curriculum!
Wonder Out Loud Together
When your child asks a question, whether you know the answer or not, pause and wonder with them.
That’s a great question!
I don’t know - let’s find out.
Why do you think it happens?
Model the process of thinking. Let them see how knowledge is built.
By doing this you teach that questions are not interruptions; they are the beginning of every learning journey
I help parents give their children an exceptional education while refusing to sacrifice childhood. If that's you, give me a follow♥️
Toan Truong retweeted
Why an AI bust could hurt far more than the dot-com crash did.
In the words of the man known as the "Dean of Valuation", Professor Aswath Damodaran, of NYU Stern School of Business,
“And that’s the real big difference between the dot-com boom and bust and the AI boom. We don’t know whether there’ll be a bust. History suggests there will be a bust.
The dot-com boom and bust had no huge capital expenditure in that cycle. In fact, there was very little traditional CapEx, or even R&D, driving it. People started apps. They basically started going on it.
This has been the biggest infrastructure run-up I think I’ve ever seen in business. You can go back and compare it to the automobile business 100 years ago. The amount of money that’s being put into AI CapEx is immense, which means that when the correction comes, the pain will be more intense.
And herein lies the second problem. The dot-com boom and bust was almost entirely equity-funded. You think, so what? Well, when the bust came, those shareholders lost 60%, 70%, 80%, or 90% of their money. You felt sorry for them, but the loss was restricted to the shareholders.
The problem with the AI CapEx boom is that not only is it immense, but a big chunk of it is funded with debt, and the debt is coming from private capital rather than banks. There’s a very real chance that if there’s a correction and companies start having problems, that problem is going to show up as distress and default, and that really doesn’t stay restricted. It spills over into the rest of society.
I’m not saying it’s going to be 2008, but 2008 is an example of what happens when lenders overreach, when they lend money at too low a rate, and the correction comes. The pain spills over.
So that is my concern with this big market illusion: the potential societal cost of having to deal with debt coming due that you’re unable to pay. It’s much more painful than your share price dropping 90% and you feeling the pain."
If you're new here, @GeniusGTX is a gallery for the greatest minds in economics, psychology, and history. Follow along for more similar content.
Toan Truong retweeted
Sundar Pichai explains why Google had its own ChatGPT before OpenAI shipped one, and still kept it inside:
"We built Transformers and used it immediately in Search to improve language understanding, understanding web pages, understanding your queries, kept building better models. We also started productizing it internally in the form of, there were teams building something called LaMDA"
"We exactly even conceived the product, which is ChatGPT. It was LaMDA. If you remember, there was an engineer inside who thought it was sentient. Think of it as an early version of ChatGPT he was speaking to, internally"
"In fact, in the Google I/O in '22, we launched something called AI Test Kitchen, and that was LaMDA, but we had constrained it because internally, we didn't have an end-to-end version which was RLHF-ed. The version I saw was a lot more toxic at a level. We couldn't have possibly put it out at that time"
"Also, I think as a company, which had this search quality bias, we had a higher bar, maybe, for what we thought was an acceptable product quality to go out"
"The way I internalize these moments is if you're in consumer internet, you're going to have surprises"
If you're new here, @GeniusGTX is a gallery for the greatest minds in economics, psychology, and history. Follow along for more similar content.
As a society, we stopped appreciating originality. With the world becoming flatter and connected every single day, information is infinite, and originality and truth is a commodity of the past.
Ezra Klein says even Ivy League professors can't assign the books they've taught for decades anymore. Their students just can't do it.
"Here's a statistic I've been thinking about recently. In 1976, about 40% of high school seniors had read six books or more for fun. Only about 11% hadn't read a single book for fun. Today, those numbers are basically reversed. About 40% haven't read a single book for fun.
"If you are looking for this, you see it everywhere right now. There are all these headlines about how kids are not reading the way they once did. There are all these stories quoting professors even at Ivy League universities about the way in which when they try to assign the reading that they've been assigning their entire careers, their students, they just can't do it anymore.
"We're losing something. We can see it on test scores that over the last decade we just see the number of kids reading at grade level slipping. Then of course the pandemic accelerated that. So if you were simply asking how are the kids doing on some of these intellectual faculties that we once thought were the core of what education was trying to promote, they're not doing well.
"And then as if we summoned it, as if we wrote it into the script, here comes this technology, generative AI, that can do it for them."
Hi! If you're new here, I'm Toan. I homeschooled at 15, graduated at 16, and got my bachelor's at 18.
Now I write about education, learning science, and psychology. Also building @GeniusGTX.
Follow me at @LearningToan if that interests you.
And if you're building something in EdTech or education, I'd love to catch up and hear what you're working on.
Ezra Klein, journalist, on The Ezra Klein Show